Walter Ellis, a former feature writer for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, worked as a foreign correspondent for 15 years, mainly in Europe. Born in Belfast, he now lives in New York and France. He believes in the European Union in much the same way that most Anglicans believe in God – an excellent idea, to be encouraged despite all evidence to the contrary. His latest novel, The Caravaggio Conspiracy, is published by the Lilliput Press. .

One is newly elected, with a working majority in the House and Senate; the other has been stymied at every turn in Congress, and faces an opponent this November who claims that, after years of stasis, a vote for him will be a vote for action.

Hollande is about to enact a 60-point programme, which includes a relaxation of retirement provisions, the hiring of 60,000 teachers, and raising tax on large corporations as well as individuals with incomes above €1 million. He is also gearing himself up to go to war in Brussels.

Obama, when not attending foreign gatherings or receiving visitors in Washington, seems to spend most of his time these days fundraising. He has largely given up on government, gambling everything on a second term in which (for reasons best known to himself) he hopes to have congressional backing for his schemes to ease the recession and create jobs.

Hollande is at the stage Obama reached a month or so after his inauguration. The voters have endorsed his programme, and he has the parliamentary muscle to force it through. But, in all likelihood, things will not turn out as he hoped.

Events beyond his control had begun to intrude long before he began his campaign for the Elysée – not always to his advantage. By the time of the election, those same events – principally EU bailouts and the near collapse of the euro – had cast a pall over the entire process. Now the most the new French president can hope for is that his measures will take some of the edge off the economic crisis, while he lobbies Angela Merkel for less austerity and more growth.

On the other side of the Atlantic, facing similar economic difficulties but at the opposite side of the electoral cycle, Obama is in the uncomfortable position of a man who believes he knows what has to be done, but has failed to persuade anyone to agree with him.

His various stimulus packages, though they probably saved the banking system, General Motors and Chrysler, were pretty well done and dusted in his first year, when he was still the new kid on the block. Health care reform – his one hope, thus far, to a legacy beyond the fact that he was the first black president – came soon after, following a no-holds-barred wrangle in the House and Senate. But this may well be overturned, or at the least amended, by the Supreme Court, which is due to rule this month, possibly as early as this afternoon.

Since then, apart from his promised pullback from Iraq and Afghanistan and the assassination of Osama bin Laden … nothing. Da nada. Zilch. The banks and Wall Street have carried on much as before, as urged by corporate donors to both parties. Private sector jobs have grown only at a snail’s pace, while states across the country have slashed their workforces, teachers included, and, in many instances, cut benefits to the bone. It may not have been Obama’s fault, but it happened on his watch. In Norman Lamont’s famous phrase, the president is in office, but not in power.

The list of things he has tried, and failed, to achieve is long and depressing. Bank reform, high-speed trains, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, private sector jobs, a cleaner environment, less dependence on foreign oil. In each case he has spoken out and made exhortations. But to what effect? I believe the technical term is diddly-squat. Americans don’t feel better about the future than they did when he took over. If anything, they feel worse. And they blame the president.

Obama resents this. He knows the truth of the matter. A large part of the responsibility for what has happened, or failed to happen, in the last four years lies with Republican members of the Congress, who, in a parody of the Founders’ requirement that there be checks and balances, have blocked almost every remedy the president has proposed.

If it were the case that Obama was a tyrant, Republicans could congratulate themselves and accept the plaudits of a grateful nation. But the fact is, the GOP has succeeded only in bringing government to a halt. Nothing moves. Nothing goes forward. Whatever the Oval Office puts up, Congress slaps down. And they do so with a smirk on their faces.

It is possible that voters will punish Republican candidates for this cynical and deeply destructive ploy. But they probably won’t. Instead, they are as likely to fall for Mitt Romney’s claim that he and he alone knows what needs to be done to get the country moving again. In the event that Romney comes through on top, with the House and Senate at his back, the political brakes will be released and the US will start to burn legislative rubber.

Students of politics looking for an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy would have to look no further. The impact of the GOP’s scorched-earth strategy would be quickly forgotten and Barack Obama would be left to write his memoirs and reflect – no doubt bitterly – on what might have been.

Alternatively, Obama could retain the Presidency, but, perversely, continue to face the wrath of Congress. Only if the Democrats win at least 30 seats in the House of Representatives and a couple more in the Senate can he hope to get his legislative programme onto the statute books.

Here in France, where the system is not unlike that in the US, Francois Hollande looks set to push his reforms through without having to worry overmuch about the opposition. His Socialist Party has never enjoyed such untrammelled power. What he does with it is another matter. He owes it to the French people to push only what he honestly believes will improve their situation. But, as he ponders his choices, at least he can point to the support of a clear majority of the electorate.

Arguably, both men suffer from too much democracy. Hollande’s problem is the opposite of Obama’s. He can do more or less what he likes. There will be no effective checks and balances. The Right, smarting after its defeat, and the far Right, denied more than a token representation in parliament because of the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, will make a lot of noise, but, for a time at least, it will signify nothing.

The real opposition to Hollande will only become clear when the president and his team go to Brussels or Berlin. There, the European Commission on the one hand, and the German government on the other, will almost certainly seek to blunt the edge of his reforms and oblige him to sup from the austerity soup they have prepared as the EU’s recurring plat du jour.

My guess is that Hollande will emerge victorious from a number of skirmishes in Europe in the year ahead. While these are unlikely to be of a scale that will recall Napoleon to mind, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and even Greece may choose the role of Blücher in reverse, ensuring, in the event of a fiscal Waterloo, that advances made are not all in the one direction. His victories will, however, have to be set against the determination of Germany and its northern league to bring renewed rigour to the faltering European project that Hollande is contracted to support.

In America, meanwhile, where the fiscal crisis began and where the national debt is calculated at more than $50,000 per head, there will either be a new broom this autumn, wielded by a man whose janitorial skills are hotly disputed, or the same old broom with the same old broken handle. I wonder what FDR, or General de Gaulle, would have made of it all.